Conclusion
National transformation
THIS plan will use a more comprehensive systems approach to provide the proper integration of physical, economic, social, administrative and financial components. The unique advantage here is the orderly integration of various interdependence programs.
Projects covering infrastructure, agriculture, industry and the social-services sectors will attain greater collective benefits as compared to a piecemeal project-by-project approach.
Implicit also in these strategies are the inter-regional linkages and complementarities of economic and social activities in the regions. This includes social-development strategies to generate improvement in the quality of life of the Filipinos.
The problem of expanding population should be dealt with, on the one hand by measures of control, and on the other, by expanding our capacities to provide for the population.
As the labor force expands, we face the task of providing jobs to some 750,000 new workers every year, in addition to 8 million unemployment in 1987. This growth also requires the expansion of educational services to develop these additions to the labor forces into qualified manpower.
The other concomitant of an expanding population is a changing urban-rural profile. Inevitably, the urban population will grow to as much as 46 percent of the total population as against 35 percent at present. The implication is tremendous, in terms not only of the magnitude of food requirements but also in terms of the requisite amenities for a better quality of life, such as housing, health, education and other social services.
Expectedly, these demands of a growing population will test our capabilities toward mobilizing our productive capacities and transforming our institutional systems. Within the next decade we must assume that the limits of agricultural land expansion will be reached, yet agricultural productivity must expand. We must prepare for technology-intensive agriculture while, at the same time, improving the efficiency of agricultural labor.
Because agriculture will become less and less able to absorb an expanding labor force, industry and services must bear the brunt of generating more jobs. Accordingly, we assess and evolve an appropriate industrialization strategy that is labor-intensive, with some bias toward small- and medium-scale industries, and provision of appropriate incentives to effect regional dispersal of large-scale industrial development.
The frontier of the sea remains relatively untapped, and promises to become the base for a continuing “blue revolution,” which was stated successfully during my administration.
The challenge for us, then, is the development of our scientific and technological capabilities not only in terms of exploration and development but also in terms of conservation and renewal of our resources.
The plan will try to evolve an appropriate institutional and administrative system that will effectively catalyze, energize, organize and execute—to attain the goal for national transformation.
The ultimate goal of the plan for national transformation is to eliminate poverty, as we expect every Filipino to be beyond the threshold of concern for survival. The effort will then be for continuing improvement of the quality of life as provisions for social improvement and labor productivity accelerates. While development itself breeds problems of environmental degradation and ecological damage, there will be programs to improve the congeniality and habitability of human settlements.
The Philippines, as it emerges as a modern agro-industrial state, will have attained relative peace and stability. We expect that our level of sophistication and developmental maturity by then will enable us to deal with the crisis or dislocations that development itself breeds, as new values and new institutions become necessary.
Self-reliance will have been attained as we exercise much more effectively a national economic self-determination cognizant of the cross-pressure from the evolving internationalism characterized by the viability of regional integration.
Most of all, we will have highly qualified human resources in all levels, functions and tasks of our development that exists today.
This plan for national transformation will set the stage for expanding our productive infrastructures; gains in agricultural-productivity efficiency, for a sustained implementation of a much more defined industrial energy, a highly qualified human and manpower resource and a stable, efficient institutional mechanism for development management—to achieve a level of income, employment and standard of living characteristic of an economy and society on an industrial takeoff.
The plan for national transformation will also seek to harmonize development planning and bring into common direction the efforts of all agencies involved in development matters. This will reinforce individual activities at all levels of implementation.
It will also seek to eliminate graft and corruption in the public service and fully develop the country’s moral, intellectual, physical and material resources.
The full text of Trilogy, in the words of President Ferdinand E. Marcos himself before he died in 1989, is in Chapter 17 of this writer’s new book, The Marcos Legacy, published this week for local and international distributions by Brown Madonna Press and Amazon, one of the world’s largest publishing houses.
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.